WC02 - Never Surrender (30 page)

Around the table, the faces of anxiety were softened by wry amusement. The old man may be facing disaster, but he hadn't lost his humour. They would remember that when they got home. But it would need more than one old man's wit if they were going to win.

He could sense their doubt, almost smell it in the heavy male atmosphere as they crowded round the table. He knew these men well, some for fifty years or more. Much of that time had been spent pushing against each other's ideas and conflicting ambitions and sometimes, he reflected, simply pushing against each other. Like Leo Amery, whose round, expectant face was a picture of concentration as he listened to Churchill's review of the war. They'd first met at Harrow. Churchill had been at the school barely a month, the lowest form of educational life, when he had hurled the diminutive but most eminent Amery into the swimming pool, thinking him to be a much more junior boy. Amery had emerged, irate and intent on retribution. The young Churchill had apologized, I'm sorry," he explained, 'but I mistook you for a Fourth Former. You are so small." His words seemed to do little to stem the older boy's wrath, so Churchill had added: "My father, who is a great man, is also small."

It had cemented a life-long relationship.

Amery understood ambition, and its price. Three weeks ago Chamberlain had offered him any post in the Cabinet in return for his support, yet despite all his dreams and desires, it had been a price too heavy for Amery. There were older memories, too. Amery could recall Churchill's father, and the day of his resignation. Most of the other boys had taunted Churchill, but Amery had come up to him at lunch and shaken his hand, very publicly, not with approval but simply from understanding. He knew the two Churchills always travelled together, even though they were so rarely seen together.

Even now, as Churchill continued with his review, his father was with him once more, sitting amongst the expectant faces around the table. It had happened so often during Winston's political career; he would imagine his father nearby, watching, never quite approving. It had always spurred him onwards, ensured he never relaxed or took anything for granted, but, just this once, he ached for someone to tell him he was right.

"I have thought carefully in these last days whether it was part of my duty to consider entering into negotiations with That Man," he was saying. One or two heads were slowly nodding. Perhaps they'd been talking with Halifax. And, as weariness seemed to seep from every bone in his body, he could no longer deny the possibility that they were right. If neither Hitler nor Halifax were the fool, then perhaps it was Churchill himself.

And then he saw Ruth. He ransacked his last store of energy in order to force her image into his mind. She was sitting at the other end of the table, her hair drawn back around her face, with that determined and Germanic jib of hers. She was frowning, scolding him, warning him. Don't bend, don't you dare bend! You are alone because you understand better than any man here. So take them with you. Do it your way. But trust them, and do it together!

"I will not hide from you, gentlemen, that what is happening now in northern France may turn out to be the greatest British military disaster for many centuries. We are straining every nerve and moving every muscle to get back as many of our men as providence will allow. It may be no more than fifty thousand. But I will not negotiate. It is idle to think that we would get better terms from Germany at this moment than if we went on and fought it out. The Germans would demand our fleet they would call it "disarmament" and our naval bases and our aircraft factories and much else besides. We should become a slave state, run by some puppet or other who owed allegiance only to Hitler."

Growls of support were coming from the far corner of the table; was that where Bracken was sitting? Ruth was slapping the table with her palms.

"No! I will not go naked to the negotiating table. Instead, it is my intention that we should fight on, with all our reserves and all our advantages." His head was up, his jaw set. "I cannot tell you what the outcome of that great struggle will be. But if, at last, the long story of these islands is to come to an end, it were better it should end not through surrender, but only when we are rolling senseless on the ground."

There is sometimes a moment within meetings of men when an idea catches fire and takes hold of those present. Such a moment is rarely planned and almost never scripted but comes about through a fusion of great passion and opportunity. It is often inexplicable, even to those who are there and who become part of it. These men around the table were, all of them, afraid and infected by that English talent for compromise, yet there was not a man in the room who at that moment would have hesitated to give his life for his country.

"Whatever happens at Dunkirk," Churchill told them, 'we shall fight on!"

Then Amery was on his feet, applauding, at his Prime Minister's side, wringing his hand; and others were following, crowding round, slapping his shoulder and swearing solidarity. Churchill had never known a group of politicians to respond so emphatically, yet he seemed oblivious, his face carved from stone, staring down the table to where Ruth was sitting.

For the first time since he had known her, she was smiling.

Halifax accepted his temporary defeat. The meeting of the Ministers was nothing more than a skirmish in a longer struggle, but news of their reaction was enough to persuade him that this day would not be his. When the War Cabinet reconvened later that evening for the ninth time in three days, he chose not to press his position on the negotiations. Winston, in Halifax's view, talked the most frightful rot. His mind was a jumble of disorder and naive sentimentality, and he was petulant to the point of puerility. His nonsense tumbled out in front of them, as if from an upturned dust cart but this time Halifax ignored it. After all, he had made his case and he didn't have to overwhelm Churchill with logic: events would do that.

Tonight would mark the second night of the evacuation, after which they had been told the operation would probably have to be closed down. No more than twenty-five thousand had been brought back fewer than expected, and not enough. Halifax had only to wait. It was merely a matter of time.

"Bring me the moon!"

Churchill was standing at the entrance to his Admiralty study, face flushed the colour of claret, waving his arms and shouting, so far as Colville could determine, utter gibberish. It had been less than ten minutes since he'd taken in a huge pile of intelligence reports, enough to keep the old fellow quiet for most of the night, or so he'd thought.

"Prime Minister?"

"Don't you see, Jock?" Churchill exclaimed, waving one of the intelligence folders excitedly, "The panzers are turning away from Dunkirk."

Colville was lost, and admitted so.

"They have changed their plans. Heading south. It can mean only one thing. Paris! Guderian and his panzer troops are glory boys, they want the most glittering trophy and they must have come to the conclusion that it has to be Paris."

"How, precisely, does that help us?" Colville asked tentatively.

"Because they don't understand the importance of Dunkirk. They think it's all over, no more than fragments to be swept up by the dumb foot soldiers of the Wehrmacht."

"And the Luftwaffe."

"Ah, but there's the wonder of it. They have pushed us onto the beaches and do you know what effects bombs have upon beaches?"

Colville shook his head in confusion.

"Bugger all! They bury themselves in the sand and go pop! Casualties: almost none at all. It gives us a chance, Jock. And the mole Ramsay's using only a few feet wide. Covered most of the time in a huge cloud of smoke. A desperate target for the bombers. With luck it may survive a little longer. And so might our army."

The Germans had changed their strategy. Since the first day of the offensive they had based their plan of attack on a concentrated fist of panzers punching huge holes through the Allied armies. It was a strategy that had brought them monumental success and made them masters of most of Europe. They had swept along, sometimes more than forty miles a day; now they were turning back when they were little more than four miles from the docks of Dunkirk. Their minds were already turning to Paris and the huge victory parade they wanted to claim for their Fuehrer.

As for the British, what threat did they pose? They'd already been seen destroying their tanks, spiking their guns, smashing every piece of equipment in their desperate flight to the sea. They had nothing to fight with and nowhere to go. What was left wouldn't amount to much of a battle at all, little more fun than wringing a rabbit's neck. Ah, but to be first in Paris, to march down the Champs-Elysees, to have the capital of the old enemy cowering at their feet that was a prize to warm old men on a winter's night. No, Dunkirk could be left to the plodding infantry. It was only a matter of time.

The British Expeditionary Force had been reduced to the role of a spectator at these great events. It had no more military significance, its condition was wretched. It would bring no glory to its conquerors. The once mighty army of England had become irrelevant, and Churchill was overjoyed.

"Let them fall upon Paris why, the French may save us yet. We must go on like gun horses, till we drop, and pray that the wind and tides are with us. We might get another night out of this, Jock, my boy, so send the ships, assemble the charts, give me the seas bring me the moon!"

THIRTEEN

But the winds refused to blow for Winston.

In the early hours of the morning the breeze picked up, slowing down the evacuation once more. And although it brought with it a steady drizzle and a low cloud ceiling that kept the aircraft of the Fliegerkorps VIII on the ground all morning, around noon the wind changed and the skies cleared. At two o'clock in the afternoon, orders were issued for FliegerKorps VIII to attack.

Fliegerkorps VIII was no normal Luftwaffe unit. It had been specially strengthened with other units from as far afield as Holland and Dusseldorf in order to provide a spectacular illustration of the might of the Luftwaffe, and two hours after the order was given, the first of four hundred aircraft -Junkers, Dorniers, Messerschmitts and Stukas with the eerie four-tone whistles on the fins of their bombs arrived above Dunkirk. There was not a single R.A.F fighter in sight. And what the Luftwaffe pilots found beneath them seemed to have been plucked from their dreams.

The wind had changed and the smoke was blowing inland. Clustered around the mole were a dozen ships, tied up alongside, sometimes two or three deep. Like an antique print of the English fleet gathered at Trafalgar, one of the pilots later told his excited ground crew. The perfect target.

It wasn't necessary to score a direct hit on a ship to cause the most fearful damage. A bomb close astern could throw it out of the water, ripping off its rudder, even breaking its back. Shrapnel caused horrific injuries, both to metal and to men, slashing open fuel tanks and steam lines and flesh. And the men who were lined up on the narrow mole had nowhere to hide, nowhere to go.

One British seaman later recalled being bombed out of three ships and being machine-gunned in the sea, all in less than an hour. The most extraordinary aspect of his story was that he should survive to tell it. Many didn't.

The mole itself was hit in several places. They plugged the gaps with hatches and wooden planking ripped from the ships.

The ships never stopped. They barged each other aside, nudging up against the mole, picking up what they could, trying to make it back home, weaving, many sinking. The bombers pursued them all the way.

Yet still they kept coming.

"Cheers, Frenchie," Don muttered, slightly drunk.

"Bottoms up, English," Claude responded, repeating the greeting he had just been taught.

They sat with their backs against the wall, peering through the open door of an abandoned cottage that Winston had discovered during one of his forays. The dog had also discovered the small cellar that lay beneath.

Don and Claude were far beyond debating the ethics of looting. Their spirits had fallen so low that, if they had stumbled upon a German patrol rather than the cottage, they might have given themselves up. Neither had changed their clothes or washed thoroughly for nearly a fortnight. During that time they had been shot at, shelled, bombed, buried beneath rubble, burnt and scorched, slept rough, hidden in sand, fallen into mud and any other manner of agricultural material. Their hair stood up like straw after the storm. Their eyes were sunken; they hadn't shaved; their uniforms creaked with sweat and soil. Don in particular was in pathetic shape his wounded arm had bled copiously, drying to a hard, menacing stain that travelled the length of his sleeve.

They found a hand pump at the back. After much coaxing, it spouted out a grey liquid that was far too brackish to drink but which felt like goat's milk over their bodies. They stood in the afternoon sun, naked, allowing their bodies to dry in the breeze and feeling their numbness and exhaustion slowly sneaking away. Their uniform rags went, too, replaced by clothing scavenged from the bedroom oh, and new socks. Beyond value. They would have looted an entire village for those. Meanwhile, Winston had begun scrabbling away at a wooden hatch set in the floor, which had led them to shelves filled with bottles and tins. Their celebration of the dog's foraging abilities was dampened by the discovery that the tins contained nothing but foie gras, but they were in no state to quibble. Soon they were settled with their backs against the wall, bottles of an excellent vin de pays on one side, open cans on the other, feeling better than they had since first they met. Winston, rewarded with his own tin, slept contentedly in the corner.

"What will you do, Frenchman?"

"If we get out of this? Fight. And find my family. They got out of Calais before the bombardment. I know they are fine." He scooped another finger of the rich paste into his mouth. "And you, English?"

"I have absolutely no idea."

"What about your family?"